Using GLOBE Hydrology Protocols for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Socioscientific Issues in a High Need Urban District

Our team of scientists and educators at Boston University (BU) are part of the Mission Earth Project funded by a NASA grant to the University of Toledo. Our objective is to assist K-12 teachers who teach science in the high need school district of Providence, RI by providing support with GLOBE and NASA learning assets. In our culturally responsive pedagogy we are attentive to the needs and interests of the teachers, often dictated by their schools' affordances (e.g. access to green space), as well as to the interests of the students.

Elementary teachers express frustration with the quarterly standards they are asked to address. These teachers find that long term GLOBE projects can be used to link otherwise isolated learning standards with socioscientific issues in ways culturally responsive to the community. In this context, the elementary teachers can choose grade dependent studies of urban heat islands, phenology, and urban hydrology for project based learning. At the middle school and high school grades, we determined students' interests directly by encouraging them to choose GLOBE protocols for a GLOBE Student Research Symposium (SRS) project. Most express interest in phenology, hydrology, and climate change. In one 6 th grade classroom, 17 of 29 students wanted to research local water quality; six high school students also pursued water quality investigations.

For this report, we focus on our support of K-12 hydrology investigations and the SRS outcomes. Protocols from the GLOBE Hydrology Bundle (water temperature, pH, salinity, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, nitrates, and macroinvertebrates) were introduced and used. At the elementary level, the BU Team developed bridging urban runoff and erosion explorations to link watershed modeling with students' local water quality explorations.

The empirical outcomes of these efforts for 2019 include: four grade 6 student hydrology based projects submitted to the GLOBE International Virtual Science Symposium; five grade 6 student hydrology based projects presented at the 2019 GLOBE Regional SRS; an SRS hosted by Providence Public Schools with 18 presentations from grades 3-9 focused on hydrology, phenology, and climate change. In the coming school year, 27 teachers are planning to employ GLOBE hydrology, phenology, and climate change projects in their classrooms.